Sarah Perry: ‘For much of my life, I loved God. The echo of that never fades’ | Sarah Perry | The Guardian

And these days I seek out my faith in other doctrines’ – he gestured at a spectrograph nearby, and a four-inch reflecting telescope fitted with filters to aid in observations of the sun. ‘I supplement God with physics, and understand each as well as the other. Which is to say: not in the least! But I find it magnificent, knowledge piled on knowledg

‘My trouble,’ said Thomas, ‘is that I have two suns, and neither outshines the other. In Bethesda I’m the worst of sinners, and in London I’m the strangest of saints, and I am never comfortable anywhere.

I daresay I must call this my home – though truly there never was so dank and drear a place – though Essex being flat and featureless at least has in its favour the kind of skies which all my life I have sought – I confess to having been surprised by affection for my husband – this dreadful emotion roused by discovering that he has commissioned a r

After the Enlightenment in the West, our collective imagination emptied the cosmos of supernatural life, as sure as industry emptied Cape Cod of cod.

Abruptly, and with unwelcome compassion for a woman he’d despised so cheerfully and for so long, he understood what loneliness had compelled Lorna to Bethesda’s door, and to all the church doors after it – recognised, in fact, her capacity to modify herself to please her company. Wasn’t he a different man to different men? It was among the least of